Saving Doctor Who: Pace and Structure

Doctor Who was better in the 20th Century.

To see why, let's look at Rogue, one of the weaker episodes Ncuti Gatwa's first season. There were two strands to the plot - in one, the Chuldur, a family of shape-shifting alien Bridgerton fans come to Regency England and infiltrate a society ball, intending to Cosplay the planet to death for no particular reason. In the other, the Doctor has a brief, doomed romance with Rogue, a Captain Jack style bounty hunter who is trying to catch them.

Unfortunately, neither of these strands had enough development. The Chuldur and their plot were slight and insubstantial. We never got to know any of their victims, so none of them seemed to matter, except for the bait-and-switch with Ruby (who was obviously going to survive the episode). Meanwhile, Rogue didn't get enough character development to explain why the Doctor would fall for him so suddenly, or why we should care about him - especially as he obviously wasn't going to survive the episode. There simply wasn't enough time to make any of the story's elements work.

The problem lies with the first and biggest mistake that RTD made when he revived the series - one he made before writing a single line. This is the single episode format that has dominated Doctor Who since 2005. Many episodes seem rushed. Either the plot and characters are underdeveloped, or the pace is breathless, or the writer tries to cram so much stuff into 45 minutes that it becomes hard to follow, or there isn't time to set up a satisfactory conclusion, so we end up with deus ex machina. It seems that Russel T Davis was subconsciously aware of these structural problems as early as The Parting of the Ways, in which Doctor doesn't have time to finish his anti-Dalek weapon, and only the literal deus ex machina of Rose looking into the heart of the Tardis and making a wish saves the day.

So why did RTD chose this format? A clue can be found in the following line from Rose.

I got the Bronze.

Russel followed the format of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had been popular in the years preceding the revival. A season would consist mainly of self-contained episodes, but build towards a final confrontation with a boss villain at the end of the season. This is the format that Doctor Who has followed (with a few variations) since.

As well as rushed storytelling, another consequence of this is that the leads have to be on screen almost all the time. This gives them a gruelling shooting schedule, and, to provide them with breaks, it's necessary to have a "Doctor-Lite" episodes - not so much Doctor Who as Doctor? Where?

Over the course of 21st Century Doctor Who's run, seasons have become shorter and shorter, from 13 episodes in 2005 to a mere 8 in 2024. This leaves fans feeling short-changed, especially when both 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble were Doctor-Lite episodes. Furthermore, because of the need for the season finale to be an event, each season finale has tried to outdo the last, leading to stories where spectacle overwhelms logic.

How did 20th Century Doctor Who do things better? Back then, stories were typically four episodes long, sometimes 6. This allowed them time to breathe. Settings could be explored, characters developed, villains given motivations, ideas fleshed out. At its best, this led to classics like Genesis of the Daleks, which had a depth of storytelling that no 21st Century story has ever approached.

When Doctor Who returns, the new production team should revive the original format. The BBC and its partners should commit to making 4 four-part stories per year. The greater depth and scope of these stories would allow us to feel that we were exploring the Universe with the Doctor, and remove the need for any one story to serve as a season finale. The pace of the action could vary from episode to episode within a story, and from scene to scene within an episode. As more time could be spent developing secondary characters, the scenes focussing on them could be sheduled together, so as to give the leads regular breaks from filming without having to take them out of a whole episode.

Doctor Who is the show that can go anywhere and do anything, but to truly reach its creative potential, it needs more than 8 single-episode stories a year. And for those of us who watched Doctor Who as children in the 20th Century, what was it we talked about in the school playground on Monday morning? The cliffhangers...

Saving Doctor Who: Introduction

Doctor Who seems to have dematerialised for the forseeable future. The Disney deal fell through, Russel T Davies is no longer involved, and the next Christmas Special has been cancelled - or rather, once the news of RTD's departure came out, he was forced to admit it had never been commissioned in the first place. Worse still, the last few seasons hadn't made the slightest bit of sense, and the last episode wrote the story into a corner that RTD's successor will have great difficulty writing their way out of. (Presumably RTD was not expecting the Disney deal to fail or the BBC to lose patience with him when he wrote that). It looks like the show will be off air for some considerable time - RTD hinted as much in an interview with Newsround after the Disney deal fell through, in which he said

The viewers of Newsround will grow up.

It's likely that he already knew he was going at that point (a drama he'd written for Channel 4 came out just before it was announced that he was leaving Doctor Who, that didn't happen overnight, and he wouldn't have done it if he had other commitments) , and he seems to have been envisioning a gap of at least 5 years before the BBC tried to revive the show again. But what should Doctor Who be like when it does return? The last few seasons have been as divisive as they have been incoherent. How can it become a show that matters again? Can it regenerate into a show that people love? What do we want from Doctor Who? I've got my own ideas, and over the next week or so I'll be putting them forward in a series of articles. Each will address a different aspect of the making of Doctor Who, and I'll try to analyse what went wrong with it, how it has been done right in the past, and what I think should happen going forward. I'll be referring a lot to 20th Century Doctor Who, which I think generally had better stories. The esssays I'm planning are:

1. Pace and Structure
2. Tone, Morality and Politics
3. Worldbuilding
4. Visual Effects
5. Behind the Scenes
6. Conclusions

Together, they will comprise my manifesto for how to recreate Doctor Who better than ever. I welcome feedback, as long as it aims to improve my ideas, not shoot them down. As the fan community is so divided at the moment, I can't expect everyone to agree with me, and some of the things I think were mistakes are likely to have vociferous defenders. I'm also aware that the more divisive storylines of recent years have attracted knee-jerk reactions from the more obnoxious elements of the fanbase. However, just because there are people who object to something for stupid reasons, it doesn't mean there are not intelligent reasons for criticising it. If I get sufficient constructive feedback, I'll add a postscript discussing the points raised, but I won't engage with people who accuse me of prejudice, or claim to agree with me for prejudiced reasons.

My Portfolio: Curriculum Vitae

The first stop on our tour of my portfolio website is my Curriculum vitae. It gives a summary of my long and varied career in data science and R&D. There are also links to case studies for some of the projects I'm particulary proud of, as well as external links to my PhD thesis and projects I've contributed to (either professionally or as open source contributions). You should learn something new on every project, and this might give some idea about just how much I've learnt during my career.

My Portfolio

Until last year, I was self-employed, and had a website for my business. When I made the reluctant decision to close down Playful Technology Limited, I wanted to keep a lot of the material I wrote for it, so I set up Dr Peter Bleackley's Portfolio on Github Pages. So what's there?

My Curriculum Vitae

A summary of my career so far

Key Algorithms

A series of articles I wrote between November 2023 and July 2024, about the algorithms I believe every data scientist should know

Case Studies

A selection of projects I worked on during my contracting career

Data Science Notebooks

Some personal data science projects, mostly on Kaggle

QARAC

An open source project to train NLP models with a concept of logical consistency

How Many Components

describes a simple heuristic for chosing the number of components to use in principal component analysis

Code Reviewing ChatGPT

An experiment to find the limits of genenerative models for code generation

Over the next few weeks I'll be going over these in more detail.

Peter Gabriel: Panopticom

Peter Gabriel has just released the first single from his long-awaited new album, I/O.

Let's just reflect on the significance of that. When I say "long-awaited" about a Peter Gabriel album, I really mean it. This album has been 20 years in the making. Peter Gabriel is the Leonardo da Vinci of rock - an absolute genius, but he takes forever to get anything done.

Anyway, here's the song. It's called Panopticom .

Lyrically, it's about how information is more available than ever before. Peter recognises the sinister side to this - the title refers to Jeremy Bentham's idea of the panopticon, the perfect prison where all prisoners are under constant surveillance (so presumably have to change their ways because they can't get away with anything) and there's a reference to the Stasi in the second verse. But Peter Gabriel is an optimist, and the song is mainly about the potential of citizen journalism to make us all better informed and hold those in power to account (as his charity Witness seeks to do). The key line of the chorus is Let's find out what's going on. Having worked in two media organisations and done independent research on Fake News Detection, I find this resonates with me, and it's good that the optimism of the early Internet is still alive.

Musically, Peter's in fine voice, there's some nice guitar work from David Rhodes, and Brian Eno adds some atmospheric synths.

I'd say it's worth keeping an eye on Peter Gabriel.

Social Media with Fewer Narcissists

If you encountered this post via a social network that was recently acquired by a narcissist, you may be interested to know that I have a presence on Mastodon . I'm putting the link to it here because, while Noel Skum has been forced to backpedal on banning links to other social networks (which would have made him editorially liable for everything on the platform), I'm not daft enough to trust him, and besides, I don't expect that platform to survive more than a year (yes, I know he's stepping down as CEO, but he'll still own it, and he's not likely to appoint anyone other than a yes-man to run it as his proxy). Decentralised, non-commercial systems look to be the way forward for social media.

Vaccines

When I was little, there was a scare about the safety of the whooping cough vaccine. My mum had had whooping cough as a child - she had a bad chest for the rest of her life (you could identify her by her cough) and she eventually died of bronchiectasis - so I was thought to be at risk of complications. So instead of the whooping cough vaccine, I got the real thing when I was about 3. Fortunately, I had some protection from maternal antibodies, so I only got what Mum described as a very mild case, but even the mildest case of whooping cough is an illness you never forget.

So when I had my own children, I made sure they got all their vaccinations, and when I got offered my COVID-19 vaccination, I didn't hesitate. My wife had had a very mild case of COVID-19 early on, and by a very mild case, I mean she was flat on her back feeling utterly miserable for two weeks.

I've now had two doses of Astra Zeneca and one of Moderna (apparently that's a good combination). I had some side effects after the first dose (cramp, fever, vomiting), but I'd take that over COVID-19 any day, No problems at all with the second dose, and the wooziness I got after the booster was probably down to the flu jab I got at the same time.

So, if you know anyone who's reluctant to get vaccinated, tell them my story. Tell them not to be afraid of vaccines, because the real thing would be far worse. Tell them that no soldier would go into battle without his gun. And tell them that the sooner everybody's vaccinated, the sooner we beat this wretched disease and get back to normal life.